


Candy Red (Different)

by davariax



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, One Shot, Pre-Sgrub
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-17
Updated: 2016-09-17
Packaged: 2018-08-15 14:28:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8059876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/davariax/pseuds/davariax
Summary: The trolls weren't typical for their generation. They were unique, lost, mutants of their own kind. Different. Cast aside.
(Or is that everyone, when nobody is looking?)





	

You think it’s been perigrees, more than long enough for the novelty to have worn off and for the emptiness set in.

You don’t feel the fire that once drove you. You don’t even remember what the fire felt like, what it was like to care, to cheer, to despair. Your mind is an ech0 chamber, voices mingling amongst each other, around each other, through each other as they clamor make her pay, make her pay. You’re just a c0nduit, an impossible bridge spanning a warzone. The touch has grown easier - a flick of the wrist sends boulders flying, whispers of the recently deceased coalescing in your mind with every movement you make.

What movement? Is it really movement if nothing physical is moving? He can’t see you now, nobody can. You’re trapped on the other side of a barrier that shouldn’t be observable from the side you’re on. And try as you’d like to care, you’re 0kay with it, you think.

y0u’re 0kay with being the imp0ssible empty gh0st y0u d0n’t kn0w what else y0u c0uld’ve been

~

You’re half your potential. Words are your enemy, and freedom is a dream. You think, it’s a dream worth every moment of suffering you endure in its pursuit, but you think that you thought wrong. yOU RETHINK. There’s not much else to do, when everything else is a struggle. You don’t know what will become of you, probably just your blood spilled out next to your independence and your pride. You don’t know what to make of that, yOU DON’T KNOW if it’d even be bad.

She’s a queen in her element, and so much like the world pressing in around you, demanding so much, when all you have to give is so little. She’s the queen of the bubble around you, a representative of the real world spreading webbing all over your cocoon. Pupa, fly, when all you wanted was to hibernate.

yOU’RE A DEAD CASE, oPEN AND SHUT, hOPELESS, yOU DON’T BELONG, yOU AREN’T OKAY WITH IT, bUT CHANGING WOULD DESTROY YOU,

~

You’re twice too much, fire and ice fighting within a single, overworked shell. Rifts dominate your mind. Ragged divides that rip you apart every so often. They put you back afterwards, but you’re always missing something. Something that isn’t yours anymore, 2iince you lo2e everythiing anyway2. A lover, a moirail, a rival.

It’s fitting. For someone who knows how everything will end, you shouldn’t expect any less. Death haunts you in your sleep, a sickly-sweet mustard haze in your mind and a seizure-inducing red-blue craze in your eyes. You don’t know where she went. You don’t ask. You refuse to admit the faintest possibility that her online status, the monospaced red words on your screen, are ju2t a halluciinatiion.

Two companions that go hand in hand. Denial and death, carving coded double reacharounds in both your lives and your hearts. You’re ace. You’re fine. You’ll escape your future. Somehow.

you can’t make up your miind about what two do. you don’t even know why you were worriied iin the fiir2t place.

~

You’re the hidden element, the lost child that learned to read the leftovers of civilization and follow its guide. You learned to read others and you roleplayed. You learned to become the predator and you pounced. You learned to hide your blood and you stayed downwind.

Sure, it’s not your dream. Your dream is rounded and sweet, your dream is tea made with leaves deemed heretical and forbidden, with sugar stolen from the blood of the Empress. Backwards and primitive, ignored and cast aside, growing in your own, but always playing catch-up.

You care so much it hurts! They call it childish, and you know you’ll die for it someday. You’ll reach out, and take into your paws the ones you love, and then they’ll see how much you really don’t belong!

:33 < you’re not sure what belonging even means anymore, when everyone is such a quill beast. you don’t know. you haven’t learned.

~

No other troll resides in such an inhospitable place, where the virus-laden reanimated dead walk under the burning sun and scaled, thick-skinned wing-beasts swoop down to pick them off from time to time. No other troll but you, that is, although with how rare your caste is and how little jadebloods actually participate in normal society, you’re not sure if you’re quite a troll.

Your tastes are undeniably queer, and even though you don’t wear them on your sleeve and complain, you know how hostile the Empire is to change, and to diversity. There’s a reason why your kind live and work in the caverns, where they are valued, instead of the stars.

You love the open light, the warmth, the Gentle Coolness Of A Night Where The Stars Are Frigid And The Ground Is A Cooling Fire. You love the peace between factions, the balance between life and death. You find it in the rainbowdrinker novels, trashy as they often are. The dynamic between A Killer And Her Lover.

Perhaps that’s why you’re so far away, so distant from the crowded heat of rainbow-spilled blood. Here, all the blood is taken in necessity. Danger is not a poison, but a spice.

You’re Uneasy With The Needless Brutality Of The World You’re Uneasy With So Much More That You Can’t Quite Vocalize You Can’t Fix It If You Don’t Know How To Describe It

~

You’re blind! That’s fine, everything’s in your head - and nose - anyway. Panic in a troll’s eyes, pigmented blood running through their doomed veins. Can’t cull a troll if they cull you first, right? You think you’d like to go down fighting if you have to, anyway. Death isn’t a problem, it’s an inevitability. The only question is how much you achieve before that point.

The only question - is whether the death is fair. You’re an invested party. You can’t make that call, no matter how impartial you try to be. The jury is UN4N1MOUS on this one! And even though the jury is no good for shit, it doesn’t matter when they all decide you are unfit for duty thanks to two simple burned-out retinas!

The world isn’t known for its fairness. You’re an anomaly, a traditionalist, a L3G1SL4C3R4TOR 1N 4 CH4NG1NG WORLD where the criminals play dirty and the Empress changes her mind on a whim. Hell, Redglare was hung by the mob. The rules don’t exist; they are made up on the spot. They are written in blood, and erased by psychics, and obliterated by guns.

YOU’R3 4 L3G1SL4C3R4TOR; YOU TH1NK YOU’LL 3MBR4C3 YOUR H3R1T4G3 TH3R3’S NOTH1NG 3LS3 TO 3MBR4C3 WH3N YOU’R3 BL1ND 4ND 4LL YOU’V3 GOT 1S 4 DR4GON-H34D C4N3-SWORD YOU’LL GO DOWN F1GHT1NG

~

Every roll of the dice comes up an eight. Every flip of the coin is a head. Every sweep of the sword slices bone, cleaves minds, breaks hearts. You’re a child of the world, and you like it here. You were 8orn to rule. You were born to take the gifts of others, and twist them into your cast-iron things of glory in the furnace that is your mind.

You respect the right-of-way that is power. You recognize and acknowledge the unmatched brutality that the Empire wields, and you’ve sought to learn from it from the very first moment that your lusus demanded blood from you. You play the game; you know the rules; you m8ke the rules.

A roll of the dice, a flip of the coins, a sweep of the sword, a twist in the pan. It’s all the same thing, never gets old, never gets boring. You don’t want peace, you want treasure and plunder and the sweet taste of a bloodletting victory. Or at least, the licorice satisfaction of a well-challenged game that you’re sure to win the next time around. Or the time after that.

Your lusus just died and you had to put her out of her misery. You don’t know what justification you could possibly have for killing so many, if not for feeding mother. You don’t know why you ever started playing this rainbow-splattered game, if not for feeding mother.

You think you’re starting to learn what regret and sincerity are. You’re not sure if this’ll earn you a justly deserved death.

~

Highbloods are supposed to be the pride of the Empire, the keepers of its values, the paragon of trollish society that all sane organisms should view as impossible role models. Highbloods are expected to be strong, respectably vicious, and perfect.

Highb100ds are not supposed to debase themselves. They’re not supposed to enjoy the twisting of the social order, the wrecking of everything that is right and orderly about the world. On a planet where violence and killing are such integral parts of society, the blood system is all that keeps everything from spilling over. The imperiously commanding high should always rule the crass low, and it is deliciously 100d to think otherwise.

You’re broken. Wrong. Shouldn’t be like this, and yet you’re so desperate to see the order right and fixed, you think you’d die if you had to. It’s satisfying in the worst possible way, and you aren’t the loose cannon you should be.

D --> You’re just you, and that isn’t enough It’s the wrong puzzle piece in a puzzle with no empty spaces at all You’re suffocating

~

You’ve never seen anyone with the same colours as you, it’s always been you in your ragged ocean-shack hive, alone with YoUr dReAmS AnD YoUr dRuGs. The other trolls stay well away; they’re scared of a monster you’ve been told is always hiding in your hive. You never could find anything - staking out the nighttime didn’t produce any good results, so you gave up looking altogether sweeps ago. You spend the extra time lounging in your hive and taking walks on the shoreline.

You’ve never seen anyone with the same colours as you. They seem to think purple is your colour, when in reality you’re the rainbow, a glory of merging red and orange and yellow and lime and blue and violet. You’re neon green, sleep distilled into the miraculous beauties of real life. You’re peace, and your life is calm, and you are HOLDING BACK THE TIDE.

The ocean is a cycle, and it is endless. You are not. It isn’t possible to stay asleep forever, that’s the stuff of miracles, not reality. Or so you’ve been told. You’re expected to fill a footstep in the sand that’s so sharp, and bloody, and violently massive. You know you could, but you’d lose yourself in trying.

YoU’Ve nEvEr sEeN AnYoNe wItH ThE SaMe cOlOuRs aS YoU. yOu kNoW It’s rEaLlY ThE OtHeR WaY ArOuNd, AnD YoU WoNdEr wHeN YoU’Ll fInAlLy bE forced to WAKE UP.

~

You’re a prince. You’re a violetblood. You’re on top of the world, minus one that you love so very much. You’re her shell, the thorns on a rosebush, the guardian of something so precious. You’re desperate and needy, and you’re so shamelessly aware of that. It should be something you conceal, but at the top of an impossibly great blood-pyramid, you find it impossible to care. If the scum of the wworld decide they have a problem, then they can suffer in their dying breaths.

You wear destruction like a scarf; it suits you. You breathe romance like a dying gillbeast breathes air - desperately.

You’re starving. It’s lonely up here. You’re peerless, unmatched even among the violets in your penchant for violence and Alternian glories. It’s lonely down here. The ocean depths are frigid, draining the heat of your blood. You swim upwards; the wwater presses in on you, compacting you into the shell of your body. As much glory as you are, you’re only a troll. And a troll is supposed to be more than a needy teenage boy.

you’re a nautical legend but the orphaner dualscar isn’t you you dealt the killing bloww to a purple tailbeast lusus anywway it’s only fair

~

What kind of struggles would you have? You’re the fuchsiablood, the heir to the throne, challenger in adolescence. You’ve got a faithful, loving moirail and an entire network of supporters who, you think, would rather have you than the Condesce as an empress. You rule the continental shelf, Alternian sunlight gently bathing the ocean floor in a web of rippling glow. Everything’s so alive, and you’re cheery, and someday you will have to kill again. But it’s calm and idyllic now. The ocean sings in glory with you as its protector, and mother silently hums along as well.

You don’t think you could stomach the thought of ruling the Empire, but it’s a necessary next step. When you’re empress, you’ll be kind and loving, patient and caring. You’ll turn the race around. You have to.

You’ll just put it this way. You’re the only fuchsia-coloured troll that has come along in… possibly tens of thousands, maybe hundreds, or millions of sweeps. You’ve got responsibility. 

You don’t intend to continue t)(e fishous cycle of deat)(. You need to be better!

~

The Empire is not a meritocracy. THERE ARE NO RIGHTS, NO EQUALITY, NO PROTECTIONS FOR THE WEAK. You do not learn this the easy way. It is there and will be there for the entirety of your very short life. You’ve had it impressed into your mind, through schoolfeed, through the cold brutality of lawnringmates and network strangers. You made the mistake of going outside of your hive when you were only a couple sweeps old. Your lusus had to drag you back in, hiding your scrapes, after a group of older trolls ganged up on you, small and nubby-horned as you were.

You have pipe dreams. Threshecutioner. Survival. Any kind of romance. Independence. Freedom.

You’re marked by your blood. Set apart by the one thing that you have no control over, designated to be the scum of the Empire and an insult to every living thing that has ever walked, swum, or flown in the atmosphere of Alternia. You don’t deserve this life, you’re a REJECT OF SOCIETY, you don’t belong.

Candy-blooded mutant.

YOU NEED TO LEARN YOU’RE NOT THE ONLY ONE.

**Author's Note:**

> Love for the trolls.


End file.
